The Venetian merchant Marco Polo left home in 1271 with his father and uncle on what would become a 24-year journey. Where did they end up, and how long did Marco stay there?
The Polos reached Kublai Khan's court at Shangdu (the *Xanadu* of Coleridge's poem) in 1275 after a 3-year overland journey. Marco served Kublai in administrative and diplomatic roles for about 17 years, returning to Venice via Sumatra and the Persian Gulf in 1295. Constantinople was a way-point, not destination. Saladin had been dead for nearly 80 years by 1271. Genghis Khan had been dead since 1227 — about 44 years before the Polos left Venice. Kublai was Genghis's grandson.
Read the full facts →Marco Polo (1254–1324) was a Venetian merchant who travelled from Venice to the court of Kublai Khan in China and remained in Mongol service for approximately seventeen years before returning to Venice in 1295. His account of the journey, dictated to the romance writer Rustichello da Pisa in a Genoese prison around 1298, became the most widely circulated European description of East Asia for the next three centuries.
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